4. Finally. Our Martian overlords have arrived.

5. 25 years ago during the Perseied meteor shower in the summer,

when I was backpacking way up in the Sierras, I saw one of those giant, glowing, green meteors. It seemed to coast lazily across the entire sky and then disappeared. I was amazed at how large and slow it seemed.

7. WOW!

We did read that one was expected, right???

edit:

An asteroid a half a football field across traveling at a blistering 4.8 miles per second is expected to pass within just 17,200 miles of Earth on Feb. 15, a record close encounter that will carry it well inside the orbits of communications satellites.

But scientists say a detailed analysis of its trajectory shows there is no chance asteroid 2012 DA14 will hit the Earth and very little chance of a collision with any satellites in geosynchronous orbits 22,300 miles above the equator.

"It's sort of threading the needle," Don Yeomans, manager of NASA's Near-Earth Object Program Office at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., told CBS News. "We know the orbit well enough that we can say definitely that it cannot hit the Earth and will not hit the weather or geosynchronous satellites."

Even so, several satellite operators have requested detailed asteroid trajectory data "so they can run them against their satellite ephemeris files to see how close this thing gets," Yeomans said. "There have been no problem (identified) so far."

9. Not until the 15th (link:)

On February 15, the asteroid will fly within 17,000 miles of the Earth's surface, closer than some 400 satellites in geosynchronous orbit, which are often used for satellite television, communications, and weather forecasting, and typically orbit about 22,000 miles up. The asteroid will not come as close as low-Earth orbit, where the International Space Station and many Earth-observation satellites orbit.

10. That was cool...

12. My brother spent a lot of time hunting meteorites in the CA desert

He even corresponded with experts in the field at UCLA to better pinpoint likely points of impact, and he used a high quality metal detector in his searches.

It was only after a few years of hunting that he discovered that his equipment's default settings (which he hadn't re-set) were tuned to detect gold. At least all that hiking probably was good for him.

He also discovered that there are some wealthy people involved in meteorite hunting. They have teams of people, helicopters, and advanced equipment. That was his competition.

18. That is bad ass.

I saw one like that over the Cascades in Washington one night, and it was disorienting to see it come down like that. The speed is difficult to grasp, since we usually just see slow shit, like airplanes and stuff, and very rarely anything from outside our atmosphere coming down. Also, the one I saw was much, much smaller.

31. We should hear within days whether any survived to the ground.

Rest assured, people are already en route to that area to look for the impact site, if there is any. It may have been a comet not a meteor. Last month we had one like that up in the Tahoe area, looked just like that but ended up being a comet.

36. Here is more information

Here's a little extra info on fireballs. This link explains what they are and you'll see that they explain the smoke trails and the sonic boom that occurs way after the meteorite enters the atmosphere. A good sonic boom can shake buildings and shatter glass.

Apparently these things are pretty common. Bright ones like this with big sound effects are a little more rare, but fireballs themselves are a daily occurrence on this planet.

47. It detonated at about 30,000

feet up, and it's a damn good thing it did. The pressure wave from the explosion did a lot of damage, breaking windows, etc.

Imagine if that bad boy had detonated at only 3,000 feet above Chelyabinsk instead. It would've likely produced the effect of a small nuclear blast - say, six to ten kilotons. Who knows? Maybe as high as sixteen kilotons, the same size as the Hiroshima bomb.

The 1908 Tunguska Event produced, it is estimated, a 15 megaton explosion - the same size as the Castle Bravo nuclear test.

62. Doing 15 kilometers per second through the atmosphere would make anything unstable

It could be a solid hunk of elementally pure iron and, as long as it wasn't a perfect sphere or something, it likely wouldn't come out of that looking pretty. The kind of forces something moving at interplanetary velocities would run into are incredible.